Drum and bass, cars, bioinformatics, genomics, microbes and life in sunny Scotland

Monthly Archives: February 2008

I haven’t been talking here much about my diet as to be honest I find it intensely interesting and would write about nothing else, but I appreciate that other people don’t feel the way. Last week I got half way to my weight loss for my New Years resolution – 22 lbs or 10 kilos depending on your metric/imperial preference.

My Hackers Diet badge is for the last fortnight and will remain updated with my progress I believe!

On January 14, 2008, Perpetual Entertainment announced that it is no longer developing Star Trek Online. The license for the game and all of its assets except for the code have been transferred to an undisclosed Bay Area development studio. [2][3]. On January 18th, all STO developers were laid off by P2 Entertainment. [1] Without the code, whoever takes over Star Trek Online will be faced with a lot of work to complete the project, which means that fans may have longer to wait for a completed Star Trek Online.

“The ionome is defined as the mineral nutrient and trace element composition of an organism and represents the inorganic component of cellular and organismal systems. Ionomics, the study of the ionome, involves the quantitative and simultaneous measurement of the elemental composition of living organisms and changes in this composition in response to physiological stimuli, developmental state, and genetic modifications.”

When oh when will it become deeply unfashionable to create new ‘omics at will? I for one can’t wait. I even had a moan about this in a recent seminar I gave. Genomics I could understand, even proteomics (I intensely dislike ‘transcriptomics’ even though I have to use the term daily), but every time a new ‘ome pops up it seems even more desparately implausible than the last one.

What I’d love to do is track citation levels of various ‘omics, see how many of them survive outside of their first use, or subsequent publications by the same lab. I even went so far as to create some overarching ‘omes. I quite like the idea of a planetome (biome just doesn’t cut it for me really), solar systome.. maybe galaxyomics, universomics? Need some seriously high throughput technology for that..

With grammar test applications currently exploding all over Facebook, their only purpose to be harvesting all your juicy personal data whilst you prove to your friends that aged 34 you really can tell the difference between “their, there and they’re”, it’s nice to come across a simple blog that holds up some of the greatest abuses of quotation marks ever seen (and doesn’t need to be sent to 10 of your friends in order to view it).

Since upgrading a few machines to Leopard, transferring data and reinstalling essentials like Microsoft Office, the Office suite has been a bit broken – locking solid and then moaning about Microsoft Framework errors. It’s usable, but you need to wait 5 minutes to actually use it which is pretty unacceptable.

The quick fix is to delete from your Documents folderMicrosoft User DataOffice 2004 Identities any of the ‘Main Identity’ folders.

Open Entourage and set up a new identity (the new email setup effectively).